'A swarm of bees in July isn’t worth a fly” but that’s when we got our bees. As a gardener, I would argue it is worth getting them whenever you can.

Granted, we had almost a year to wait until we had a stack of honey in the larder, but the sound of bees on a good summer’s day humming as they are working your garden takes a lot of beating.

I think they are a gardener’s ideal companion, the bees are as enthusiastic about your plants as you are, they get happily on with their pollinating and feeding, side by side with me doing my weeding, pruning and dead heading.

I am giving them a great range of plants and they are giving me a bit of their honey. In the winter you should leave them alone for long periods, which suits fair-weather gardeners too.

Being well on the way to being self-sufficient – bees seemed the logical next step, especially as we consume almost a jar of honey a week.

I hadn’t realised the bonus of home-made honey, we used to buy the regular, heat-treated kind. This treatment reduces its freshness and changes its composition.

My chemist son, who is heavily into nutrition, always used to buy bioactive honey, which has not been heated above 48C or pasteurised. It does have extraordinary antibacterial properties and manuka honey is especially associated with these. Now he raids the larder.

Many say that a lot of raw honeys are just as good as manuka, but because the more potent manuka honey is not to everyone’s taste it is now marketed mainly for healing.

Recent research says natural honey can even stop you snoring as its properties can reduce minor nasal-related infections. It contains antioxidants, pollen grains and other goodies too. It certainly makes the pigs’ day if I give them some honey comb.

For the first year, there is a fair bit to learn. A friend bought Beekeeping for Dummies but we joined the local beekeepers’ association, and my husband went on a course for six afternoons.

He was given a bee buddy, Richard, who pops over to offer reassurance and expert help. He is always at the end of a phone. It works brilliantly for us, and hopefully we are not too needy for Richard.

We bought a first hive and put it at the outer edge of the shelterbelt in the orchard. It is fairly sheltered, a warm spot and minimal bee air miles for the veg and fruit.

I regularly tend the wild flowers running around their hive and have few qualms about working close to the hive. If they sting you it kills them and other bees are attracted to the smell and may well come and sting you too. Not something that’s good for them, or you.

They do react strongly to smells. Aftershave can make them angry and they appear to react less favourably to natural male odours than female ones. My “earthy” smell after a day digging and delving causes precious little reaction, even on days when my husband reckons they are tetchy.

A friend mowed around his bee hive on a ride-on mower and the vibrations caused them to attack him, even following him into the house. They hate this sort of disturbance.

Bees certainly have moods and when you get to know them you can tell their mood by their buzzing. A few unfortunates acquire bad-tempered colonies, which they cannot keep, but this is rare.

Time-wise, I reckon they take about one-and-a-half hours to two hours a week of looking after during March to October.

We feed them a sugar solution at the end of September so they have enough honey stores to survive the winter. If we didn’t do this we would get less, or possibly no honey at all.

For most of the winter they are best left alone – if you open the hives you let the vital heat escape. They cluster to keep warm and sometimes fly out on a cleansing flight to remove waste and such like.

Occasionally it’s worth “hefting”, lifting the hive corners to see how much honey (food) they have.

In March on warm days they start to fly, looking for food among the wild cherries and blackthorn. Our wild cherry (Prunus avium) crops seem to have exploded, we now have huge, delicious, edible cherries and the birds leave my soft fruit.

In April the apples and pears are visited before the arrival of the rape in May. The bees will fly three miles or so to get this as it is extremely easy for them to harvest. The resultant honey is more crystalline and harder but delicious.

Other summer jobs include watching for them to swarm so you can entice them to a new hive next door (we now have two), seeing they are healthy, putting on more “supers” (chambers where they can form honeycomb) and then collecting the first batch of honey around June. This took a few hours over two days during which the kitchen became a little hot and sticky.

Apart from honey you can collect the wax and make candles, furniture polish, face cream or just barter it with the suppliers in return for foundation (wax sheets for making honeycomb).

Our first crop of 16 jars caused real excitement. We love it and are hoping for a similar-size second crop shortly. Though sadly, we are all still giving the pigs a good run for their money in the snoring stakes.